TagSeattle Times(265)

By  Dominic Gates Seattle Times aerospace reporter The fuselage panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines jet earlier this month was removed for repair then reinstalled improperly by Boeing mechanics on the Renton final assembly line, a person familiar with the details of the work told The Seattle Times. If verified by the National Transportation

By  Andy Pasztor Special to The Seattle Times Probes of the recent Boeing 737 MAX cabin blowout must expand far beyond safety practices and manufacturing controls. Investigators should scrutinize persistent company failures over the past four decades to become more transparent and law-abiding. Before this month’s cabin blowout on an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 jet

By  Dominic Gates  Seattle Times aerospace reporter While Boeing’s leadership scrambled to contain its latest crisis — following the in-flight door plug blowout on an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 — top executives at Airbus confidently laid out the rival’s success in 2023 and its dominance of the commercial airliner business. The data on last year’s jet

By  The Seattle Times editorial board Boeing is in the region’s collective DNA. Even though the company decamped for Chicago in 2001 and is now headquartered in a corporate suburb of Washington, D.C., Boeing still has a special place in our consciousness that goes beyond its statewide workforce of about 60,000. Call it pride. Pride

Jan. 14, 2024 at 6:00 am Updated Jan. 14, 2024 at 6:00 am    By  Dominic Gates  Seattle Times aerospace reporter When a door-sized section of a 737 MAX 9 fuselage exploded out into the void 16,000 feet over Portland, Boeing’s once-solid reputation, already staggered by the two MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019, took another

By  Vonnai Phair  Seattle Times staff reporter If you’ve traveled through an airport during the winter holiday season, you’ve probably experienced the habitual holiday horrors: weather delays, canceled flights, grueling lines, miserable crowds. Tack on the stresses of travelling internationally — and having to consider factors like customs and citizenship status — and holiday travel

By  Christopher Elliott Special to The Seattle Times Travel Troubleshooter If the latest wave of proposed airline mergers has left you a little worried, then you have a good memory. Historically, airline mergers are terrible for passengers. And the latest two — the proposed combination of Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines, and of JetBlue Airways

By  Dominic Gates  Seattle Times aerospace reporter You wouldn’t know it to look at them. Junior Alaska Airlines flight attendants say they are barely getting by on poverty level wages, many of them building up debt and scrambling to make rent. Yes, they look sleekly professional on the job. But some with children qualify for

By  Erik Lacitis  Pacific NW magazine writer Postscripts 2023: Catching up with some of this year’s cover story subjects. AMID OUR COMPLAINTS about this or that being wrong with Seattle, we locals can forget why this is a truly magnificent city. So thank you, tourists. In June, I wrote a story about the most-asked questions tourists have when

By  Dominic Gates  Seattle Times aerospace reporter Scientific debate is getting heated over what to do about airplane contrails — the wispy lines of water vapor you often see trailing behind a jet. Those harmless-looking vapor trails sometimes spread out to form thin cirrus clouds. Environmental activists and nonprofits focused on climate change routinely assert